Investment Friday: Solo Oil

The excitement over the discovery of oil and gas soon died down when they realised there wasn’t quite as much as they thought. It sent Solo Oil’s price up over a penny and for a while we danced in the streets and celebrated.

Then came the crash back down and I was making a loss on Solo Oil once again, but the long termers hadn’t forgotten the real assets in Tanzania. In the past few days we’ve had one RNS after another. Horse Hill was better than they thought it would be and news from Tanzania was good too. Solo now has a bigger stake in the discovery in Tanzania and is about to go from a company prospecting for oil to an oil producer business. Many investors suspect the big companies are watching with interest and so a takeover bid could drive the share price to new heights. It’s all looking good regardless of what happens; those who lost faith and sold out are probably regretting it. At the time of writing the price is 0.57 which is higher than it was on Monday.

The government is selling off tranches of it’s Lloyds shares and so Lloyds isn’t doing so well. The share price went over 80 briefly, but then came the kiss of death from the government. It’s not too bad at the moment at 75.12, but many shareholders will be glad when there is no government involvement in the business. I bought at 29.9 so it’s a multi-bagger for me!

Taylor Wimpey is performing well for me and I expect it will do even better when it’s promoted to the FTSE 100. They are riding high at 132.5. I bought at a shade over 100, so that’s not so bad. Not as exciting as an oil strike, but safe as houses!

I’m still losing money on Graphene Nano, but they are very promising. They make graphene lubricants for the oil industry and have numerous other applications they are testing; like a graphene enhanced vehicle battery. I think they will climb as they win contracts, but a useful technological breakthrough could see them soar.

I’m also making a small profit on Royal Sun Alliance (RSA), but their problems are industry wide. They are consolidating the business and concentrating on the home market. I can see some insurers going out of business, I hope RSA isn’t one of them.

Premier Foods had some bad publicity over it’s ‘pay to stay’ policy. It’s scrapped that now and is publicising it’s products for the Christmas trade. I’m not sure if Mr Kipling is exceedingly good now, but they are on special offer just about everywhere. I think they should go back upmarket. Times are tough, but people are still shopping and seem to have loads of money to spend. PFD needs to market better and increase margins.

I’m only making a few quid on Tesco too, they need to get their act together and maybe come to a mutually beneficial agreement with Premier Foods. They are both in the same business.

The ones that got away

I was going to buy Debenhams at 62, but couldn’t make up my mind. They are 73p now and maybe still a little on the low side. Balfour Beatty was on my list too and they went up to 197.1. Balfour Beatty went up 2.82% on Thursday alone. Immupharma (IMM) is on my watch list and seems cheap. They are researching a drug for lupus and as I have lupus that could be a good investment in more ways than one.

Please remember that I only give investment opinion, not advice. You can make money investing, but you can also lose money! My return doubled this week from just under 9% to just over 17% thanks mostly to Solo Oil.

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